A recent survey has found that over a quarter of 18-25 year olds cook only two meals per week for themselves. Despite the best efforts of Jamie Oliver and TV shows such as The Great British Bake Off, a large majority of young adults appear to struggle to cook basic meals when they move out.

According to the Vouchercloud.com survey, the top three reasons why young adults only cook two meals per week are ‘not knowing how to cook many meals’ (28 per cent), ‘can’t cook’ (27 per cent) and a quarter were ‘too lazy to cook for themselves’ (75 per cent).

Chris Johnson, Head of Operations at the firm spoke on the matter saying: “Hopefully, parents will look at the results of this study and spend more time with their children in the kitchen before they fly the nest and discover they can’t in fact fend for themselves.”

Students often get a bad reputation for their inability to cook and look after themselves. However, the survey was not restricted to students.

When asked their reasons for leaving home, only 21 per cent answered university, with 25 per cent ‘needing own space’ and the majority of 42 per cent said that independence was the reason. Over one quarter admitted to hoping to find a partner who would cook for them instead of learning to do so. Until this dream becomes a reality for the young adults, almost two thirds got their remaining meals from their parents’ home despite more than two thirds leaving home to get away from them.

Other meals came from takeaways, which accounted for 59 per cent so it is no surprise that on average 18-25 year olds spend more than double on takeaways than they do on supermarket food.

Timothy Silcock, a third year Social Policy student said: “To be fair in first year I cooked as little as possible because my kitchen in halls was disgusting and I hated my housemates so I wanted to spend as little time as possible there, but how do 18 year olds not know how to cook basic meals?”

It was not just cooking for themselves which proved to be a struggle – even cleaning and waking up on time proved to be other tricky skills that many were unable to cope with doing. This is a worrying state of affairs especially since there are numerous YouTube cooking channels only clicks away. Many believe that this is merely a product of the society we live in whereby celebrities, fashion and beauty are more important than knowing basic life skills such as cooking and DIY.

“How can these people not know how to cook but they can build a whole city on Minecraft? People need to get their priorities in order, it’s pretty embarrassing to be fair”, said Dan Jones, a second year History student.

Vouchercloud.com carried out the survey of 2,413 UK adults. It is the UK’s most used multi-channel money-saving brand that has helped consumers save over £19mn.